Posted
by
samzenpuson Monday August 12, 2013 @10:23AM
from the so-long-farewell dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "BlackBerry is considering whether to sell itself off to the highest bidder. The company's Board of Directors has announced the founding of a Special Committee to explore so-called 'strategic alternatives to enhance value and increase scale,' which apparently includes 'possible joint ventures, strategic partnerships or alliances, a sale of the Company or other possible transactions.' BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins added that, while the committee did its work, the company would continue to its recent overhead-reduction strategy. Prem Watsa, chairman and CEO of Fairfax Financial—BlackBerry's largest shareholder—announced that he would resign from the company's board in order to avoid a potential conflict of interest. News that BlackBerry is considering a potential sale should surprise nobody. Faced with fierce competition from Google and Apple, the company's market-share has tumbled over the past several quarters. In a desperate bid to regain its former prominence in the mobile-device industry, BlackBerry developed and released BlackBerry 10, a next-generation operating system meant to compete toe-to-toe against Google Android and Apple iOS—despite a massive ad campaign, however, early sales of BlackBerry 10 devices have proven somewhat underwhelming."

It was over for blackberry. Mr. CEO could now check his email on the exchange server, sync his calendars, and the rest without the purchase and maintenance of an extra (and rather expensive) Blackberry Enterprise Server. Once that happened, it was game over for Blackberry.

As long as BB holds on, Microsoft has competition for the third place. In effect, unless BB completely disappears, it's balkanizing RT sales. By buying BB, if nothing else, it consolidates third place. From there, well, maybe it can take on Apple. I doubt it will ever really dent Android, which is too vast and on just about every price point for mobile devices.

It could do other things, like embed BES into Exchange, which has interesting possibilities. As awful as BES is to deal with, it has advantages over Activesync.

Is it? They've been losing market share steadily over the last few years, some of their newer products aren't selling as well as they'd hoped, and people are proportionally buying more devices of anything but BlackBerry.

Their PlayBook was a bit of a flop, and they've stopped providing updates for it.

Except for entrenched people who are still using it, my perception of BlackBerry isn't a brand which is still strong -- it's a brand in decline desperate to stay relevant as the smartphon

It was over for blackberry. Mr. CEO could now check his email on the exchange server, sync his calendars, and the rest without the purchase and maintenance of an extra (and rather expensive) Blackberry Enterprise Server. Once that happened, it was game over for Blackberry.

Once Android licensed Exchange it was much the same way.

Arguably, it was a two-stage kill: Microsoft's late-and-largely-unlamented PocketPC/Windows Mobile (pre 7) implemented "activesync" ages ago to compete with RIM (indeed, after a brief period of attempting to eat Palm's lunch, attempting to eat RIM's lunch became their chief purpose in life); but that didn't help all that much because WinMo devices made Blackberries look like elegant triumphs of engineering and UI design.

Once a device that consumers loved, and an increasingly bearable and very cheap OS licen

And you can't do that with iOS and Android devices? With side loading it is harder to control but I think the enterprise license from Apple allows you to do all of that. At $1000/yr with unlimited devices it is a reasonable cost.

If you're managing large numbers of mobile devices then you also want to manage app versions, manage upgrades... BlackBerry does all of that very well....Is it enough?

Unfortunately, no, it is not enough.

What you are talking about is mostly something only large businesses are interested in doing. For the vast percentage of companies - the small and medium enterprises (SME) - the above is not a priority for them (arguably, it/should/ be). They want to minimize IT spending, which usually means letting employees use their own devices (again, arguably a more central control might reduce the overall IT cost but it requires a larger outlay up front, which SMEs want to avoid).

When Blackberry was king, these added features - app management, etc. - were nice bonuses to Blackberry's central advantage: email everywhere. But its not why most people used the phones. Now that other smartphones have (mostly) matched Blackberry in its central strength -email - , SMEs are debating whether those extra features are worth the cost. Increasingly, they are deciding it is not, especially since they require IT cost to maintain BES server to take advantage of those features. Better to just let the employees bring their own cheap devices and let them connect via Exchange. There's no need to provide the hardware (either by directly providing the employee with the phone, or indirectly by making the employee get his own Blackberry but balancing that out with better pay) or worry about support costs.

For large enterprises, the additional features of the Blackberry bring worthwhile benefits, and the extra cost is practically unnoticeable to them, so they will likely keep to Blackberry as long as they can. More, large enterprises already have large IT teams so BES is just another assignment for that division. But large enterprises comprise only a few percent of total businesses. SMEs are 95% of all businesses in the US and 75% of the workforce. Its a significant loss.

In all fairness, BlackBerry made damn sure everyone knew that they had handed the keys over and created plenty of lead time so people in India could have alternative solutions. They handled this as responsible as they could have. That's not remotely similar to the USA situation with the telcos of secretly handing customer data over.

All phone manufacturers and ISPs have to follow the laws of their host country. For that reason BlackBerry was required to hand over access to BIS encrypted traffic.

However, BlackBerry's BES (business) security was not affected. Each enterprise keeps its own keys, not BlackBerry. There was nothing to hand over to the government. The government would have to go to each business individually and demand the keys.

BYOD is already starting to see push back from IT in a serious way because companies are starting to realize that at the very least they need some sort of "enterprise Android" they can control. You want to bring some crappy $100 Android phone that'll never get updated into a big company? That's the height of stupidity. That's about as smart as letting your employees bring their virus-laden Windows boxes and probably barely ever patched Macs (most Mac users I know don't even know what version of OS X they're

(most Mac users I know don't even know what version of OS X they're using!)

You say that as if Mac users are more ignorant or something. Most *Windows* users (a far larger sample) don't know what version they're using. That's a far worse showing since there's only been 4 major choices for consumers in the last 10 years (XP, Vista, 7, 8) compared to OSX's 8 major versions.

For Mac, Windows and Android, the average person's (correct) answer as to what major OS version they're using is "whatever it came with when I bought it." (iOS on the other hand has an extremely high adoption rate

If that were true, Windows phone would have hammered the market however a sickening thud was all that was heard.

Android and Apple got to the market first while Blackberry was still sporting it's banal interface and relying on entrenched government contracts for it's bread-and-butter. That was a ridiculous short-sighted and lazy gamble by BB. They are now trying to change directions in mid-stream but everyone has already moved on and they are arriving at the party with an empty keg. BB should have gotten

Android and Apple got to the market first while Blackberry was still sporting it's banal interface and relying on entrenched government contracts for it's bread-and-butter. That was a ridiculous short-sighted and lazy gamble by BB.

It may have been short-sighted but it wasn't lazy. The problem was that RIM saw what Android and iPhone did, and honestly thought that nobody would want it. I recall reading an interview with a RIM engineer at the time saying they laughed when they saw the iPhone because all the feedback they had ever got from customers (who were all corporations) was that users wanted long battery life, a good keyboard and strong enterprise management.

They just totally missed that with the advent of the iPhone and later An

I remember hearing that BlackBerrys are pretty common in some poorer countries, mostly because of BlackBerry messenger helped avoid high SMS fees.

Now, you have Line, WhatsApp, iMessage, and more and more competitors to that advantage. Then, as BlackBerry market shrinks, it gets less and less useful due to network effects. They're talking about releasing BBM clients to other OSes, which may have worked at some point - cannibalize some sales in order to keep s

Thing is, Blackberry should have seen the writing on the wall the day ActiveSync was announced. It didn't take a great deal of imagination to see this as being Microsoft's way of muscling in on Blackberry's turf.

Yes that is hard. Many of BlackBerry's best features rely on BBOS or QNX. Android doesn't have them. It would be a massive porting effort. Android is often open source so once they finished porting they would have to share what they wrote with Samsung.

Given that BB10 already has compatibility with Android application, what does Android do for them?

You may have meant Android is GPL'd / Copyleft / Free Software, but that's absolutely NOT true, as basically only the Linux kernel is GPL'd, while the rest of Android is under freer licenses. The preferred license is the Apache 2.0 license (similar to MIT/X).

You might have MEANT that, but you sure didn't say so. Neither did the GP.

Calling it open source when you meant GPL/free software, and also calling it "Android" when you apparently meant Linux specifically, only served to completely confuse any point you were trying to make.

The problem for Blackberry wasn't that they ported to QNX. It was they were so late in doing so. iPhone came out in 2007 but Blackberry responded by slapping touch on top of their existing OS. Many of us knew that the former OS just wasn't capable of being upgraded to compete with iOS or Android. It wasn't until 2010 that Blackberry bought QNX. Then rushed out the Playbook which didn't even have contacts, messaging, or native email. Some apologists still say that was intended but we knew that was BS.

Yes it did make them look bad. They floundered a lot. In 2010 they were still king of the hill, dictated terms to others and exploring expanding into complex verticals. It took time for them to realize they could lose it all.

Isolate driver failures? Aside that, QNX is a real-time microkernel with guaranteed scheduling, so it can ensure that, say, your phone doesn't freeze up when you get an incoming call. Android can't promise that.

First off, it doesn't really matter what QNX can do vs. Linux. RIM/Blackberry wrote their features against QNX. They would have to rewrite chunks of them against Linux or XNU (BTW iOS kernel is XNU not Mach).

There are plusses and minus to QNX. QNX offers much better automated syntonization so low level routines in Linux have hand-coded syntonization while QNX code frequently doesn't. QNX applications have deterministic execution times which means that chunks of the code know that process X is finished b

Uh, no. QNX is a very recent development for RIM. Historically all those BBOS features were written against their in-house BBOS kernel, not QNX. Moving to QNX required a porting effort.

Yes it did. And moving it to Linux would require another porting effort.

Dude, stop bullshittin' about stuff you don't know about. It only takes a couple seconds of googling to determine that the word "syntonization" doesn't mean what you think it means. It's a low level radio function.

QNX is a microkernel. What can the QNX microkernel do that the Linux kernel behind Android can't?

You said it yourself; QNX is a microkernel, while Linux is not. Go look up all the benefits of microkernels, and you'll have your answer.

A few quickies: The security can be absolutely impervious to attackers (see OpenVMS winning in every hackathon). The system can be mind-bogglingly stable, even if the drivers are crap and crash all the time (see OpenVMS at the top of every uptime chart). The system can run

it's pretty hard when they've invested all their time for past years for buying another os and doing crap..

but you know what? what sucked about bb always was availability outside of carriers.

how the fuck could I buy one or develope for one if I HAVE NEVER SEEN ONE ON SALE LOCALLY- and this is in Finland. RIM has always ignored large parts of global market, that is to say that they were never a truly global player.

Excluding BB10, to have a BlackBerry function you either needed BIS or BES. If there was no fairly extensive carrier support nor was it being purchased for a corporate client with a BES the phone wouldn't work. Finland is Nokia country. I'm not shocked carriers didn't want to give RIM a complex feature set to do stuff that Nokia / Symbian mostly already did.

Maybe they could have a bidding war with Yahoo... They've been moving aggressively into HP's "Where Technologies go to Die" turf lately, and a line of Yahoo! Mail branded blackberries would be perfect as a component of Yahoo's "Just think of us as a weighted average of Google and AOL" strategy.

The blackberry is the most counter-intuitive, unfriendly phone I've ever used. Its killer app is email, but being that it's a PHONE, functions like SMS/MMS, phone, and voice mail should be just as easy to use. No, instead the text messages disappear into a mess once you've read them, you have to dig through menus to access your voice mail number, and you accidentally dial people all the time because touching a phone entry, or pushing the nav button, or pushing the dial button all dial the phone. I have t

I had someone in a bar complaining about the exact same problem. I don't know if this works for all providers, but for Verizon Blackberries, all you ever had to do was hold down 1 to quickdial voicemail.

BB remains the only handset/technical network that I can put users on a world wide tariff and provide a secure service at a reasonable cost. Period.Sadly, Blackberry seems to be run by idiots, who don't understand their own strength, or their own product.

And yes, I can put my users on Iphones and on Android and I can cry my eyes out as soon as they leave the borders of the country they live in.

Even *if* they remodelled the business in software, they could still leveage BB core work and sell a really workable product. Yes, not for everyone, and yes, aimed at corp, business and gov - but they seem lost in terms of what they are.

Lying to the customer base is bad too and Thorsten Heinz needs to be fired. The Playbook isn't getting 10? Liar.

CEO's that lie or get their baseline facts wrong are worthless. They are worthless to whom they work for and worse for their customer. He had his shot - he should resign.

Proverbs 16:18: Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.
This was BlackBerry's issue - they thought they were the king, and that they didn't need to listen to the market. "You don't need a camera. That's crazy talk", "Nobody will accept a touch keyboard", "No other devices will gain corporate acceptance", "Employers will always make the choice for employees" etc etc. It's been one long "we know what you want better than you do" at BlackBerry.

This was only true at first. You have to hand it to them for a valiant effort at competing with android and ios, but they kind of did it in the same way as windows phone and failed in the same way as well. BB10 is a pretty decent OS, just like WP8, but no one cares. Why? Because they don't bring anything special to the table and without that, there's no competing with established ecosystems. They (and Microsoft) made an overpriced and mostly closed off device. Google did well against apple because they did

BlackBerry's downfall wasn't having lost a competition against Android or iOS. Their downfall was needlessly making it into a competition. BlackBerry had the opportunity to build and ship the first-ever Android phone. But they turned Google down. Google had to settle for a little known (and at the time not very good) manufacturer called HTC, maybe you've heard of it?

Same exact thing happened over at Motorola. Same exact thing happened over at Nokia. Three companies at the top of the cellphone world, insi

Notice how handset makers come and go, while the networks themselves, like AT&T, are set in stone? Do you really think this is because AT&T is so humble and innovative? Handsets are interchangeable and short-lived. A company is no better than its last product or two. Nobody has managed to be king of the hill as long as Blackberry did. And my guess is the days of windfall profits in the sector are numbered at this point anyways.

Actually, I think your analysis is off. Their real problem, in my opinion, is that they never got their systems working smoothly.

Configuring a BB server is a bitch, and it all depends on connectivity to RIM, which is a dumbass move. Then they put out several generations of handset that failed during normal use due to design flaws, and then they rolled out BB10 which doesn't sync as well as the older system, and crippled their companion tablets in the process instead of providing the software upgrade they'

They don't listen to their customers. They have two main groups of customers -- corporate/government and consumers. The former just wants a piece of equipment that is secured and efficient for communication; the latter group wants a device to do everything apple could do. Instead of producing two lines of products, they combine them in a half as--s product that couldn't do neither well. They had their chance.
Hint hint: Steve, please listen. Corporate customers do not want your Windows 8.

Corporate customers aren't supposed to want Windows 8. They are mostly satisfied with Windows 7. What Windows 8 will do though is make them unsatisfied with Windows 7 style applications, forcing vertical applications to code for Metro prior to the time when Android is ready to act as a primary OS. They don't need to want it, they just need to accept it.

It's surprising to me that geeks have missed the golden opportunity to drive home one consistent message: Western tech companies need to grow up and invest in hardware and stop saying it's too hard and expensive. Qualcomm's CEO earned a Ph.D. in EECS from Cal-Berkeley, and Qualcomm has bought ATI's Mobile Graphics division and developed its own ARM SoC. Apple bought Palo Alto Semiconductor and developed their own ARM SoC. Samsung spends billions on up-to-date fabs, has their own ARM SoC, and their own L

Feel free to disagree, but I think what killed BB in the end was losing their reputation for reliability. They may not have been the newest shiny object, but dammit, when you made a call, it went through, no matter how you held the phone. Being tightly integrated with the company intranet was a huge plus, something that android and ios still don't have completely. I miss being able to tap on a meeting organizer name in calendar to message him I'll be a little late.

I suspect that national outage awhile back started people thinking about single points of failure. I know that when BES went down for a week (not Blackberry's fault -- we outsourced our BB admins and that did not go well) most of us BB users had Android or IOS phones on order by the time it came back up. Blackberry ("Crackberry") got us hooked on instant gratification -- immediate access to office communication -- and when it went away, we were not prepared to take that cold turkey.

I don't think it was one thing, but I agree that was a huge factor. It was the same thing that killed Danger (Sidekick) after the acquisition by Microsoft. Customers do not respond well to an extended outage. Blackberry can't run around claiming to be the best in IT while having an incident like this.

Blackberry can't run around claiming to be the best in IT while having an incident like this.

Which is very odd. They're more reliable than, well, everyone else. Hell, they're more reliable than our electrical service!

The only reason that Great Outage (which didn't even impact most customers, and most of those were affected for less than a day) was even newsworthy was because BlackBerry's services are so incredibly reliable!

Compare that to Apple's month-long MobileMe outage, the uncountable outages afterward, the regular iCloud outages, and even their recent month-long developer center outage. Those aren't even news. It's just par for the course. Yet Apple inexplicably maintains a reputation for reliability.

In web services? Apple has a terrible reputation for web services. They have a great reputation for hardware reliability mainly because they are compared to bad desktops and Android phones. That being said, there is a

BlackBerries not on BES conversely needed BIZ. The outage was devastating.

As I pointed out, the majority of their users were completely unaffected. Of those who were, most were out for less than a day. I should also point out, that many of those affected only experienced slowdowns.

iPhone works fine without Apple servers

The same was true for the Great BlackBerry Outage. The phone still functioned as a phone, as did apps. Messaging (Email and BBM) were really the only services significantly impacted, though every message was ultimately delivered. (The same can not be said for their competition.)

I have a company-supplied Bold, and it is easily the worst phone I've ever touched. Its not reliable at ALL. It only syncs when it feels like it, reception is poor, and the battery life is so bad its never charged anyway. And for some reason, if the battery starts to go low, it just turns off the cellular modem but doesn't turn it back on when its put back on charge. Basically, if you keep one eye on it, it'll just stop getting emails.

The innovative ways that Blackberry devised to suck are impressive. The b

um, yeah, you should have sent it back. I've had a Bold and a Tour, (two different carriers) and haven't had any of the experiences you describe. The desk holder is head and shoulders the best ever created. There's no connector to press in, as with both of my Droids -- you just drop the phone in the general direction of the slot and it switches to desktop mode and starts charging. No problems with reception or battery life, although I did invest in the extra capacity battery as a job requirement.

I'll respectfully disagree, as I think the shift had more to do with the fact for most users, everything changed at home.

For years, most people had a cheap candy bar / flip phone, or at most, an expensive candy bar / flip phone. All phones were pretty dumb and very similar. Remember the RAZR? It was The Thing for a while, but looking back, it wasn't really that much different from everything else.

The hardware was sexy, but the software was horrible. Nobody liked the OS, nobody thought the phones were respon

You have some good points there, especially about the Blackberry tablet, which could have been good but ended up being... a toy. Blackberry did blow it in many, many ways.

My answer will take the form of a question. Isn't anyone else out there bored with a plethora of applications that consume idle time but don't actually enrich one's life? I'm finding that after a couple years playing with this neat little miniature touchscreen computer, I'm bored. I don't really use it, *really* use it, much except for

I'm sure there is some value in the device, technology and related patents, but perhaps the greatest value is in the patents the own for ECC (Elliptical Curve Cryptography). Now that RSA's algorithm is on the way to being cracked, it's possible many will move to ECC -- and that means big money for Certicom, who is owned by...Blackberry. I know RSA will refute the patent claims and there is sure to be a war, but whoever owns Certicom has a big dog in the fight. The NSA has been pushing for ECC for almost a decade, so none of this is new news. However, it will be a factor in the level of interest for potential acquirers.

RSA is not going to be cracked. And moreover if RSA could be fully cracked, i.e. prime factorization was a solved problem then ECC wouldn't hold up either. It is not difficult to map any ECC problem to a finite collection of factorizations on the integers.

Crypto experts speaking at the Black Hat USA 2013 conference yesterday said there's a real -- though perhaps not overwhelming -- possibility that much of the Internet's encryption will soon become completely unraveled. This grand unveiling of secrets, they contended, could arrive within a handful of years. To avoid what they jokingly called a "Cyber Pompei," they strongly encouraged a switch from algorithms based on the Diffie-Hellman and RSA systems to elliptical curve cryptography.

Hype. There's a VERY small chance that RSA could be cracked (that's in the article you linked). If RSA is cracked, the development in number theory is likely to have a LOT of repercussions. I suppose the recommended switching to ECC because it's the only other option.

I'd like to here the original and not just a reporter's summary. But assuming this is accurate then In my read, dumb advice. If DLP is solved EC factoring is solved. The article has mistakes a perfect solution to DLP is a perfect solution to factoring. I could imagine that progress is made in DLP, something like a another million+ reduction in computation, which EC factoring is less susceptible to. But if the problem is solved and these papers aren't just about a speed up then game over.

It doesn't matter if RSA is cracked or not, the DH-RSA mode of TLS with perfect forward secrecy has a 300% setup performance penalty vs. non PFS modes, while the 64-bit optimized version of ECC TLS PFS only has a 15% penalty. The former is a hard sell to sysadmins - the latter, not so much.

Somebody in the open source patent pool project (IBM, Google, Redhat, etc.) needs to come up with the cash or other incentives, perhaps as a group, for the future security of the Internet, which is a critical dependency

Even after years of failiures, RIM remains Canada's largest company that wasn't a national/regional bank or involved in sell off Canada's natural resources. Canada just doesn't have a business culture that allows for innovation or giving customers what they want.

Nobody remembers Nortel huh? There seems to be a model here for Canadian Tech companies. At one point a few years ago Nortel could do no wrong, the same could be said for RIM (or now Blackberry). RIM lost ground because they held onto their old beliefs in the consumer market, that their products could do no wrong and that people would always expect and pay the Blackberry tax. I think what eroded that were devices that were sexier and had a wider selection of apps. Sure, the Corporate markets were big m

There may be value in Blackberry's patents and cash on hand but otherwise the company isn't worth very much. And competitors don't buy dying companies - they just let them die and then buy whatever pieces they want in the resulting fire sale.

Single most successful smartphone on the market with two other models in the top five. Earning more than 50% of the entire industry's profits. Nope. Apple is fine. The market is crowded and competitive but Apple has firmly grabbed a profitable portion of the market and, unlike RIM or Nokia, Apple isn't afraid to innovate and change direction when its necessary.

RIM should package and sell their killer app: The integrated Email / Calender / Contacts system. IMO, it would change the face of productivity on android-based phones.

The BEST feature of my old BB was the seamless nature of accepting meeting (calender) requests via email, using contact information on the phone. This was just using my normal email provider, not a BES setup. Worked like a charm!

I've had my Samsung android phone for a year or two now, and despite trying a boatload of different (free and paid) email apps, I've never seen one that can manage calender requests

What version of Android are you running? I haven't seen any issues like that with Android since 2.2. Granted the HTC mail client had issues with handling Exchange accounts properly through 2.3 (I dropped HTC and never made it to 4.0 with an HTC phone). Maybe the issue is Samsung's proprietary email client? Because I've been using the stock android mail client since 2.3 seamlessly with ActiveSync. The only downside I see is that you can only sync one calendar (the default calendar) but that is a limit of

Much like WebOS, which I loved by the way, BB is now a sinking ship. I've played around with the BB10 and it's actually a pretty cool phone. The problem for me was that it was so different from Android and iOS, in term of the gestures and just how it flowed. You'd have to basically relearn, and unlearn, the whole smartphone ecosystem and I'm not a big enough BB fan to do that.

There just doesn't seem to be room for more than two big players in the smartphone arena. The only reason Microsoft is still in there

While RIM/Blackberry have been victims of trends in the West, that's not been the case in India, from what I have read. While in the US, people have abandoned the Blackberry for iPhone & Galaxy, in India, such trends don't suddenly disappear, unless there is a disaster in the market itself. So since the Blackberry had a 'coolness' factor to it at one time, particularly in the offices, it's stilll popular in India, where offices still standardize on them, instead of going

I think we need to ask this question: Of the top 5 engineers you know, potentially including yourself, what would it take to get them to go to work for Blackberry? Discounting the top people you know who wouldn't want to leave their current employer, of the top 5 who have a willingness to move for the right offer, what would it take to get them to go to work for Blackberry?

The fish rots from the head, and of the people matching this description who I know, it would take interesting work, the ability to ma

So the company that essentially made everyone want a smartphone (recall the crackberry) explores ways to die.

Something is wrong at the top of a company when they create a market then hand it to a rival without even a challenge.

Nonsense. It is healthy economics at work. There are lots of huge companies that no longer exist because their markets dried up, or because the competition became better at playing the game than them. Their business plan was to have an innovative product. Now, Apple and Samsung have larger research departments and get products on the market quicker than Blackberry. Better try to sell off whatever is left now than wait until the next wave of Chinese smart phone producers floods the market and kills them off

So the company that essentially made everyone want a smartphone (recall the crackberry) explores ways to die.

Something is wrong at the top of a company when they create a market then hand it to a rival without even a challenge.

It's a more common problem than one might imagine: Massive success is certainly profitable; but it makes you conservative and risk-averse (you don't want some fancy skunkworks project, even your own, to cannibalize your cash cow, and your whiny customers want compatibility). It can also constrain your horizons: RIM effectively crushed all comers to the 'mobile email' market (WinMo's numbers were never pretty, even with MS pushing it, and Palm never really recovered after it became clear that PDAs would be network-connected, rather than intermittently docked, in the future); but barely even attempted, much less recognized as the looming future, cellphones-as-mostly-general-purpose-computers until 'email' had already become something that the competitor's markedly superior (as computers) phones could handle adequately by virtue of being a computer with an internet connection.

By "for sale", you mean "subject to hostile takeover through accumulating a majority of shares." But once word of a potential takeover gets out, the stock price rises, which is why Comcast bought NBC-Universal in 2011 and not Disney in 2004 [slashdot.org]. And there's a bunch of red tape in certain jurisdictions before an entity can buy more than a certain percent of another corporation's shares. (In the US, for example, a 5 percent stake requires filing Schedule 13D or 13G with the SEC.) Besides, t